Wednesday, January 07, 2009

This pisses me off like you wouldn't believe.

Lemme give you a hint. See, one of the big historical complaints about letting women in the military is that they would distract the male soldiers and basically serve as company whores. It's been used as a barrier for quite some time.

So this guy takes a survey that notes that hey, a lot of Marines have STDs (How shocking that people would have spontaneous sex when they have a job that might result in being blown up!) and a number of them had them before being recruited. That in itself is a good an useful survey, the sort of survey that lets Public Health know where to focus and lets medical staff know what to ask about and educate on dsuring annual physicals and lets the post exchange know what to stock up on discreetly.

But hey, look how he starts the article:

Thanks to desperate recruiting methods required to staff those wars, the U.S. Marines may be turning military service into a male sexual fantasy land, where recruits are paid actual money to cohabitate with drunk, stoned, horny teenage girls.

And ends the article:

This is great news for randy young men weighing a career in the Marines -- as long as they're fastidious about wearing rubbers.

This blogger frames a potentially life-saving public health survey as the Marine Corps recruiting sexually adventurous young women to sleep with all the horny young men they recruit. He basically outright says that USMC women are sluts and that the military is a huge co-ed orgy. To his credit, he stops short of suggesting that the other girls are just trying to snag a pilot for marriage but he's still driving home the same shit that was said about nurses, that was said about the WACs and the WAVEs, and that's whispered about military women right now. That they're immoral sluts who are there to sleep with the guys in the unit.

That they don't belong there and are there for the sexual gratification of the male troops. Which--I don't care if you're pro-war or pro-peace or selective about what war and what peace--is just plain misogyny, and fuck him and everyone else who pulls that kind of shit.

3 comments:

That pisses me off too, and as an evil warmongering Republican male, I'm probably coming from the "opposite" side on most of those. (To put it simply, I want the United States military to be as powerful and effective as possible, which means I want our very best people there. Excluding some of them solely on the basis of a physical difference that's irrelevant in the vast majority of 21st century military operations is just plain stupid.)

Of course, there *are* a lot of military veterans who say women in combat would be a disaster. And they said the same things about WACs and WAVEs, or women officers, or women at West Point/Annapolis, or women combat aviators, or....

I once heard General Tommy Franks say something apropos when asked, after he was out of the Army, a question about how the Iraq war was going.

He said something like "Every soldier is an absolute expert on how the Army really works... or how it worked on the day of their retirement." On anything developing after that, they're likely about as clueless as the rest of us.

My reaction to this guy's post was "only just worked that out, geniuses?". No, I don't find it surprising that people on combat assignments would engage in spontaneous, even unprotected sex either.

I'm also well aware that this is hardly a new phenomenon. My grandmother, who was a nurse on RAF bases from 1940-1946, could tell this man stories that would curl his hair.

It doesn't matter what war, what recruits, what training, this is what happens when you put people in a situation where death is a very real and constant possibility.

I don't need a study to tell me that or to tell me the consequences of it. The forces didn't need it either except, as you point out, to target their pharmacy order and distribution more effectively.

And people of either gender who risk their lives in the forces, no matter what you think of the wars they fight because that isn't a serving soldier's choice, deserve better than to be lambasted by this ignorant tick. I'm not about to judge someone's morals when they could end up explosively dead any minute. Leave it to them to regret their actions after their demob and just hope they survive to have regrets.

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